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Vince Giordano and The Nighthawks kick off the 2016-2017 George Flynn Classical Concerts series on Sunday, Aug. 21 in Clinton’s Andrews Memorial Town Hall. Photo courtesy of George Flynn Classical Concerts

The George Flynn Classical Concerts series kicks off its 2016-2017 season with one of the world’s foremost traditional jazz musicians, bandleaders, and scholars.

Grammy-award-winning Vince Giordano and his legendary 11-piece band, the Nighthawks, will play on Sunday, Aug. 21, at 4 p.m. at Andrews Memorial Town Hall in Clinton. The concert is free and open to the public, thanks to a trust established by Clinton native George S. Flynn, most of whose $3 million estate went to creating a permanent home for classical music in Clinton—one that would make music accessible to audiences for years to come.

Giordano’s musical credits are long, formidable, and include performances at the Newport Jazz Festival, Jazz at Lincoln Center, and iconic New York City nightclubs, as well as appearances in films and TV series such as The Cotton Club, The Aviator, Finding Forrester, HBO’s Boardwalk Empire, 2015 Academy Award- and Golden Globe nominee Carol, plus half a dozen Woody Allen movies, including Café Society—now in theaters—starring Jesse Eisenberg and Kristen Stewart.

The public is also invited to a free screening of a newly released feature-length film about Giordano, which will be shown the day before the concert—Saturday, Aug. 20, at 4 p.m.—also at the Town Hall. (For a sneak preview, visit hudsonwest.org/our-films/futureinthepast.) Because the film is showing on the same day as the Clinton Summer Fest & Fireworks, parking for moviegoers will be available at Unilever, with free shuttle buses to the Town Hall. The shuttle begins running at 3 p.m.

“Vince Giordano is a one-of-a-kind musician who has made his life this music,” said Elaine Godowski, president of the trust that administers George Flynn’s bequest. “You don’t have to travel or spend money to see these world-famous performers, because we bring them here.”

“The extraordinary thing about these performances is this,” said the trust’s vice president, Jim Beloff. “These are world-class performers, an unusually high level of global talent, performing in the tiny town of Clinton. And every show is free.”

Giordano began listening to 1920s and ‘30s jazz when he was five years old. While the Swing Era ushered in more contemporary rhythms and pushed traditional jazz into the margins, he’s never lost his taste for those early sounds.

“It’s a mixture of dance, jazz, and vaudevillian styles, and it reaches people. It may not be as cerebral as other forms of jazz, but it’s fun. It’s uplifting and optimistic,” he said.

Giordano was first exposed to traditional jazz growing up in the 1950s and watching old black-and-white cartoons.

“There was always this music, and this is the music that I love. The kids of my age have said, ‘Oh—that’s cartoon music.’ They thought I was just nuts,” Giordano said.

In addition to playing string bass, tuba, and bass saxophone, he is a bandleader as well as an archivist and historian who learned his craft as a teenager from the last generation of the original practitioners of early jazz. Over a 40-year career, Giordano—who does not look old enough to have a 40-year career—has amassed an encyclopedic collection of more than 60,000 period band arrangements, the largest private collection of its type in the world, which includes the music of Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman, Bix Beiderbecke, King Oliver, Fletcher Henderson, Jimmy Lunceford, and Benny Moten. He has also seen the rise, fall, and resurgence of traditional jazz, and he knows firsthand what it’s like to have work dry up and to have to sell some of his prized arrangements just to keep things going.

Fortunately for Giordano, the music he loves is enjoying a renaissance among young devotees, who refer to it either as “trad jazz” or its original name, hot jazz. Today’s hot jazz bands, mostly musicians in their 20s, play New York City clubs nearly every night of the week as well as at retro-nouveau summer dance events like the Jazz Age Lawn Party, which attracts more than 3,000 millennials in vintage Roaring Twenties attire.

Writing for Vanity Fair, author, and Wall Street Journal music correspondent Will Friedwald, wrote, “For these young players, the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow is Vince Giordano and the Nighthawks, the 11-piece ensemble that’s kept the torch burning for pre-swing music for almost 40 years. Most of Giordano’s regular musicians are in their 40s and 50s, but he occasionally hires up-and-coming artists, such as 26-year-old twins Peter and Will Anderson, two reed players (clarinet and saxophone) who have been working with Giordano since 2007, their sophomore year at Juilliard.”

Shifting tastes in music and entertainment, however, still worry Giordano, who has played to packed houses as well as empty rooms.

“Playing the Newport Jazz Festival was a real feather in our cap,” he said. “You should see the fellows when I told them—’What?!’—you know, they couldn’t believe it,” he recalled, laughing. “But as high as we could get thinking about playing there, I was a little worried, because we’re not cutting-edge. We’re not free-form jazz. We’re not bebop. Would we go over? Would we be a round peg in a square hole?”

Giordano is not only the leading authority, purveyor, and practitioner of big band music of the 1920s and ‘30s, he’s also Hollywood’s go-to guy for authentic period movie soundtracks.

Aside from a regular gig at Iguana restaurant and dance lounge in midtown Manhattan, where they play every Monday and Tuesday night, he and his band are working on two major film projects: the upcoming HBO Bernie Madoff biopic The Wizard of Lies, starring Robert DeNiro and Michelle Pfeiffer, and Amazon’s Z: The Beginning of Everything, a television drama series based on the life of famous flapper, socialite, and wife of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Zelda.

Amber Edwards, who co-directed the 90-minute documentary Vince Giordano: There’s a Future in the Past with Dave Davidson, said that between the bandleader’s moments of glory on film and stage, “there is the struggle to find gigs, manage personnel, and schlep the necessary yet arcane physical trappings of a big band to every job—with no road crew.”

For every gig, Vince and his partner, Carol Hughes, have to hoist all of his oversized instruments into their van along with leather binders holding 3,000 arrangements for each of the 11 musicians, and a collection of unwieldy essentials: antique trumpet mutes, lighted music stands and banners, a period microphone, clarinet megaphones, and the stray 100-pound celeste—similar to an upright piano.

Edwards said, “It’s one thing to carry the cultural burden of keeping hot jazz alive for 40 years [and] quite another to literally carry the tons of gear that go with its performance for all that time. Meltdowns occur, and the threat of going out of business constantly looms.”

And as Davidson observed, “The tension between those transcendent moments in the spotlight playing the music he loves and doing what it takes to get there is where the story lies.”

Giordano’s dedication has paid off, and a new generation of hipsters embracing the music, right down to the clothes and dance steps, like the Balboa and the Peabody.

“That’s not surprising,” said Edwards. “When this music first appeared 90 years ago, it was transgressive, shocking, and wild. It was music by and for young people. It practically forces you to dance.”

Giordano added, “I think a lot of younger people like the energy of this old music. It has a rhythm that captivates them.”

Vince Giordano—There’s a Future in the Past made its world premiere at the Manchester (U.K.) International Film Festival in March, where it won the award for Best Music Score. Its U.S. premiere was at the Kansas City FilmFest in April, where author and director Chuck Haddix called it “the best jazz film I have ever seen.”

Following Saturday’s film screening in Clinton, Vince Giordano and The Nighthawks will perform live on Sunday, Aug. 21, in the 400-seat Andrews Memorial Town Hall theater, known for its excellent acoustics.

Tickets are available at no cost at the door or in advance by calling 860-669-1208. For more information, visit www.georgeflynnclassicalconcerts.com or www.facebook.com/GeorgeFlynnClassicalConcerts.

Note: In the event that Clinton’s Summer Fest & Fireworks take place on the rain date, parking for the movie will be available at the Town Hall, and parking for the concert on Sunday will be at Unilever, with shuttle buses. Notices will be posted by Friday, Aug. 19.

Tickets are available at no cost at the door or in advance by calling 860-669-1208. For more information, visit www.georgeflynnclassicalconcerts.com or www.facebook.com/GeorgeFlynnClassicalConcerts.